Food and Cheer and Song
by Elizabeth Culmer
Summary: When you finally get a group of friends together after possibly the worst day of your collective lives, obviously the next step is to light a fire, toast marshmallows, and sing. Or at least it's obvious to Roxy. (Alpha Timeline Fluff, part 5)


**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Andrew Hussie. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

**Author's Note:** This was written for Cotton Candy Bingo (a Dreamwidth fanwork bingo community dedicated to fluff) in response to the prompt _sing_.

**Summary:** When you finally get a group of friends together after possibly the worst day of your collective lives, obviously the next step is to light a fire, toast marshmallows, and sing. Or at least it's obvious to Roxy.

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**Food and Cheer and Song****  
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So okay, three of you are now permanently your dreamselves and Jake's dreamself is dead, you're pretty sure Earth just kind of blew up along with the entire universe (at least in your time; Jane's time still has four centuries of batterwitch oppression to suffer through), you have no idea if Dirk's doofy rapbot managed to save any of your neighbors when it brought your house into the game, you have a nice vivid-fresh memory of getting stabbed through your guts to bring you screaming nightmares the next time you fall asleep, and you're still feeling guilty as hell that you couldn't make yourself kiss Jane back to life no matter how freaked you were by A) finally touching another human being, B) seeing your best friend all spatter-splat dead, and C) kissing a corpse, which, seriously, whose shitty design idea was that?

But who cares!

All your friends are here in the same place at the same time, the dude making the Red Miles on Derse has either called them off or is just too far away for them to find you anytime soon, and the backhanded advantage of fossilized game planetoids is that all the programmed baddies bit it along with the helpful NPCs. And from what Jane's said, you're going to be stuck here a while waiting for some mysterious godly people. Maybe even months. You have to do something to pass the time, and you just so happen to have one machine that breaks shit down into grist jewels and another that uses that loot to make any damn thing you can imagine.

The next item on the agenda is OBVIOUS.

"We're not building a campfire," Dirk says, because he's a paranoid sourpuss.

"There is _nobody here_," you explain to him, sobriety and the aftershocks of adrenaline wearing at your affection for your kinda-sorta moirail. "Therefore there's nobody to see the fire, which means there's nobody to go report the fire to anyone or sneak around and ambush us or whatever shit you're flipping out about over."

Wait. One of those prepositions was extraneous. Dammit, you're so used to not paying attention to your words that even when you're sober and trying, they still muddle up a smidge.

"I must admit, I agree with Roxy on this issue. A party sounds like an excellent way to unwind after our adventure, and surely a campfire can't do any harm," Jake chimes in. Bless him. You favor him with a wink and a saucy grin, and flash victory signs on the inside when he suddenly forgets how to work his feet and trips over thin air. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Lalondes are choice sexy bitches, as desirable as they are dangerous, and you are proud to live up to your mom's legacy. (Not that you really want Jake that way, or at least not enough to step between him and Jane. Or him and Dirk, whichever. They're both way the hell more invested in that dream than you ever were.)

"I've always wanted to go camping," Jane adds. "I tried to join the Girl Scouts when I was nine, but apparently it wasn't the done thing for a Crocker to belong to the Kitchen Scouts' rival organization." She turns wistful puppydog eyes on Dirk.

Either he's just as susceptible to Janey as you are - very possible! Janey is like that - or he's feeling guilty about making her watch that whole circus with Jake kissing his decapitated head when he _has_ to know she likes the big lug too.

Dirk sighs. "All right. Jake, I assume you have some experience building fires?" Jake jumps to agree, and Jane immediately volunteers to help. As a friend, of course!

You are so going to kick her stupid tight-assy ass for that bullcrap. At least tell Jake how she feels so he can make an honest choice! This pining thing is just dumb, and also has the potential to get as creepy as Dirk's manipulations. Romance makes people _stupid_. Love's simple, and you're pretty sure sex is simple since writing porn and flirtlarping are simple. So what is it about sticking sex and love together that makes people so completely weird? (Yeah, even you; you will freely admit you are just as fucked up as the rest of these idiots. _Le sigh_.)

Dirk herds Janey and Jake off in search of a more defensible position to build their fire, because he's still being a control freak even after he's agreed to go along with your plan. You make a note to ruffle his hair just to watch his face do that non-expression thing.

It's funny how he acts like he's granting you persmission - persimmon - persnick - per_mission_ for this party when you only asked in order to be polite. If you want a campfire, you're damn well going to make a campfire, end of discussion. Also, you have lit way more fires than Jake English. You grew up around the little cookfires your carapace neighbors use to cook mutant fish, rabid gulls, and whatever seaweed they can gather from the shallow sea around your floating habitat module. You are a fire-lighting champion.

But whatever, you have more important things to pull together. Like marshmallows. You've dreamed of roasting marshmallows over a campfire since you were old enough to find the video files your mom left where she talked to you about important things like snowball fights, rescuing stray cats, and her quest to punk Dave Strider at every one of his film premiers. (And also things like their rebellion and Sburb and some really abstruse stuff about subtext and symbolism in _The Complacency of the Learned_, but that's just business.)

She and Dirk's brother and Jake's grandma went on a camping trip once, in the woods that used to grow underneath where your house floats. They roasted marshmallows, told ghost stories, and sang silly songs your mom learned as a kid - she'd been a Girl Scout, the way Jane didn't get to be, and apparently Girl Scouts believed people should sing when they went camping.

It was one of the best nights of her life, your mom told you across the centuries, resting her chin in her hand and looking wistfully to the side of her webcam. Then she sang some of the songs, which didn't strike you as particularly silly. Most of the lyrics were awfully sad, and even the other songs had kind of melancholy tunes.

You think you understand better now. Your mom knew her world was going to hell but being with her friends made her happy anyway, just like singing a sad song on your own can be depressing, but singing it _with other people_ makes it uplifting no matter how bleak the words and tune might be, because you're making something beautiful together. The carapace people sing when the sun rises and when the stars first shine through the evening sky - you think the frog hymns originally came from the Prospitians and the squid hymns from the Dersites, but by the time you met them they all sang each other's songs. They let you join in too, and it makes you feel like you belong even though you're so different from everyone else in the habitat.

You hum to yourself as you mess around with alchemiter codes, beating algorithms over their metaphorical heads until they cough up the right set of items and the right combination methods to produce what you need. Armed with four metal skewers, a bag of marshmallows, a box of graham crackers, and several chocolate bars, you follow the sound of voices to a little hollow in the grassy terraces of Jake's mini-planet, half-sheltered by a broken overhang of bare red rock.

Hiding the light won't do much good if people can hear you from miles away, but you decide not to mention that. Dirk might want you all to try talking in whispers, and fuck that noise. For one thing, any attempt to make Jake be quiet is inherently futile, and for another, you are not going to spend months of your life running scared. You've been hiding all your life, and you are officially Done With That Shit.

You raise your voice and start over at the beginning of the song you were humming.

_"Out of my window, looking through the night,  
__"I can see the barges' flickering light.  
__"Silently flows the river to the sea  
__"And the barges too go silently."_

Unexpectedly, Jake joins you for the chorus, his enthusiastic and slightly ragged tenor echoing an octave below your own soprano.

_"Barges, I would like to go with you  
__"I would like to sail the ocean blue.  
__"Barges, have you treasure in your hold?  
__"Do you fight with pirates, brave and bold?"_

"Roxy? What are you singing?" Jane says, a bit uncertain.

"It's a bondified Girl Scout song, cross my heart an' hope to die again," you tell her. "Join in!"

"But I don't know the words," she says.

You laugh so hard you have to fold over at your waist, dropping your supplies to the ground in order to clutch at your stomach.

"Roxy's the last person who'd care about mixed-up words," Dirk says, looking up from polishing his katana. In the firelight his hat casts a nearly demonic shadow over his face, just like the flames turn Jane's and Jake's hair into tangles of impenetrable tentacle-y darkness. It's a cool effect, but you think maybe you'll skip the ghost story portion of the festitivies. Argh. Fes_tivities_.

"Oh. Right. Er, but, I didn't quite..." Jane fumbles, like she was actually worried she'd insult you by pointing out the obvious.

"I so totally don't care!" you assure her. "Jake! Verse two! Let's go!" He grins, all golden-toothed like a shipwrecked pirate, and you launch into song together.

_"Out of my window, looking through the night  
__"I can see the barges' flickering light.  
__"Starboard shines green and port is glowing red  
__"As the barges signal far ahead."_

You wave your hands encouragingly toward Jane as you hit the chorus again, and she opens her mouth in a tentative alto. Half a beat later, Dirk joins in humming actual harmony a third or a fifth or something lower than Jake.

_"Barges, I would like to go with you,  
__"I would like to sail the ocean blue.  
__"Barges, on the river you may roam  
__"On the river, always, you're at home."_

Jane trips over the words and Dirk isn't even trying to figure them out, but you don't care. It's not about being perfect. It's about being together.

"That was bally marvelous," Jake declares. "What other songs do you know?"

"Lots," you say as you sit down and pass around the skewers and marshmallows. "But let's take turns. What songs do you guys know? Rap doesn't count!" you clarify because if you give Dirk an inch he will milk the hell out of it.

He holds up his hands, palms forward. "Hey, chill, I hear you. Actually, I think I have a song you'll love - I found it messing around in old web caches a few weeks ago and kept forgetting to send you the link. Do you know _Do-Re-Mi?_"

"Doe, a deer, a female deer?" Jane says, and you nod and point at her rather than trying to talk through a mouthful of marshmallow. (It's not toasted, but the night is young! And you need a comparison point anyway, since you've never had any processed antediluvian food that couldn't survive four centuries of uncertain storage conditions. Holy _wow_, this is sweet!)

Dirk grins, a little half-quirk at the corners of his mouth. "Yeah. Same tune, same idea, but this version's way more fun. It goes like this:

_"Dos, a beer, a Mexican beer,  
__"Ray, the guy who brings the beer,  
__"Me, the one who drinks the beer,  
__"Far, a long way to the john..."_

When you recover from trying to laugh and swallow a marshmallow at the same time, you raise your skewer in salute, a torch with a burning marshmallow for its flame. Dirk ceremoniously lays his skewer across yours. Jane and Jake follow suit, tapping their skewers against yours like they're swords and you're the Three Musketeers or something, which nearly sets you off again, but you win your fight to keep a solemn face. Then your marshmallow melts into the fire on a long, gooey string of burning sugar. Whatever, you have more.

As you jam another sugary lump onto your skewer, Dirk starts the song again. All four of you sing together, your intertwined voices rising into the dark sky to mingle with the drifting wisps of xenon and the distant blue light of Skaia.

You don't mind if the godly people take their time arriving. Being with your friends is already the best prize ever.

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**AN:** Thanks for reading, and please review! I appreciate all comments, but I'm particularly interested in knowing what parts of the story worked for you, what parts didn't, and _why_.


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